The Devil's Mistress by David Barclay (summer reads txt) 📗

“Came you to pay what is owed?”

From out of the night stepped a woman with flowing, dark hair and an elegant, regal face. A crimson robe hung about her shoulders, open at the front to reveal the sensuous lines of her sex. The Nothing was silent as the woman rounded the fire pit and came to stand before her.

“My child, look at the state of you,” said the Lady of the Hill. “So much pain for one so young. Surprised am I you had the strength to come so far.”

With no preamble, no thought or conscious intent, the Nothing lunged. But where there had been a woman was now an empty robe, which slipped through her talons and fell to the ground in a tangle of cloth. She tripped and went sprawling down, landing on top of one of the skin-clad forms. There was a sound like rattling wood, and the figure crumpled into the earth.

The Nothing picked herself up, finding naught but a broken skeleton beside her. All around the circle, skeletons. The skulls of the dancing figures stared out from beneath their skins, hollow and motionless in the flickering light.

“Who is this creature who attacks me in my home?” The Lady’s voice, echoing from somewhere beyond the flames. “Is she perhaps a vengeful spirit?”

A sound like the scuttling of feet. A chorus of laughter from the dark. The Nothing spun in place, but there was no one there.

“What is your name, child?”

She ran toward the voice and nearly collided with a tree. At the edge of the light was naught but a dense and impenetrable forest, grown so close together as to seal her in.

“Be not silent,” the Lady said. “If you wish me to come, speak your name.”

The Nothing beat her fists against the tree, then let out a wail so dolorous and pitiable it might have woken the dead. She crumpled to the ground, a lifeless doll in a playground of the damned.

The Lady’s voice, both wondrous and terrible, said, “SPEAK. YOUR. NAME.”

Nothing, the girl mouthed. My name is Nothing.

“No.” The Lady was suddenly standing before the fire, her glorious form back lit by the flames. “Your name is Isabella. You came to me once when you were in need.”

The Nothing shook her head.

“Aye, ’twas you then just as surely as you sit before me now.”

No, the girl mouthed. Liar. Liar!

The Lady sat beside her and took her cheek within her hand. “I spoke true to you, child, though you were too blind to see it. I told you your father would die heedless of your efforts. Did you not believe me? His path was woven the moment his partner died. Did you think your Thomas would share the mill with anyone, that his mother would let him?” She shook her head disapprovingly. “The only thing that staid Thomas’s hand was his desire for you. Perhaps not love as you would think of it, but it was love of a sort. Love that you snuffed when you came to my door.”

The Nothing shook her head again.

“’Twas not your fault, child, but it was your hand. The threads are as you made them.”

And then Nothing discovered she was not Nothing at all, but a terrified girl who had once held the world within her palm, and now held the jagged, blackened remains of her heart in its place. She moaned into the Lady’s arm.

“There, there. All is ’twas meant to be. You are here with us now, a child of the night. You were always here.”

The girl Nothing wept. She had never known her mother, who had died bringing her into this world, but in that moment, she knew a mother’s love.

When at last she had no more tears to give, the Lady brushed a stray lock from her face. “Do you wish to make it right?”

She only stared, having no idea what the woman meant.

The Lady stood and took three paces toward the fire. “Do you wish to make those who have harmed you suffer? Do you wish retribution upon them?”

The girl Nothing continued to stare. She thought of Thomas and his preposterous lies upon the platform. She thought of Sloop, of Sands, of the deceitful and cunning Marianne, so confident upon her witness chair. She thought of her father, who had died for trusting the best in people, and of Jacob, who had died hanging from a tree. These two, most of all. Would she see them avenged, now that they were gone forever?

She nodded. Yes.

The Lady turned and extended her hand. “Then dance with me.”

She took the Lady’s palm, not at all certain she could dance in her current state. Then the drum resumed, and she found her feet moving on their own. The Lady moved with her. Eye to eye they were, palm to palm, twirling and revolving in the light.

The figures upon the ground cast off their animal skins and rose up, not as skeletons, but as people once more. They were women all, bare-skinned and lovely in the glow of the crackling fire. The girl Nothing gasped.

One of the women went to the flames, where hung a small pot, and began to mash the contents with a stone pestle. The others paired off and began to dance, five couples spinning within the circle.

The beat of the drum increased. The women danced faster. They were laughing, and whispering, and catcalling at the Lady. In return, the Lady smiled, and all at once, released the girl Nothing from her grasp. The other couples did the same, and the Nothing found herself face to face with a new partner, a woman with curly black hair and a beauty mark upon one cheek. The woman took up the dance once more, leading the girl in a fast and delicate sway.

The drum increased again, and again. Each time, the women switched partners. The girl Nothing danced with a young woman not much older than herself with freckles upon her neck and nipples the